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[IGN] Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Will Have a Character Voiced by Text-to-Speech at Launch, it Will be Patched Later

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dex3108

dex3108

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Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week. While we really dug the game (you can check out our review for more on that), there's one odd detail that stuck out we can't help but give its own article: one of the game's minor NPCs will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch, seemingly because someone — probably Ubisoft — forgot to record and add a human being's voice for the role.

While in discussions with fellow early reviewers during the review period for The Lost Crown, it was pointed out to us that the voice of a tree spirit character, Kalux, sounded remarkably like either an AI or text-to-speech (TTS) program. Specifically, a TTS program that's available online for free for use by streamers. You can compare some of the lines we recorded (embedded below) to those same lines processed through the TTS program right here.
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Notably, the character in question does not seem to be credited with a voice actor in the game's credits, despite — as far as IGN can tell — every other voiced character appearing there with a named human credit. None of the other characters in the game sound like AI or TTS programs, including multiple other tree spirits like Kalux. All in all, it's a weird situation; Kalux only has a handful of lines, and some of Prince of Persia's actors voice multiple characters, so it seems that it would have been easy enough to cast a voice actor to do these as well.
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IGN reached out to production studio Side UK, which is credited as having handled the game's voicework, for comment, and received the following:

SIDE London provides casting, production management, voice direction, voice recording and post-production in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, for which we work with a talented cast of professional actors. As a production company, we did not have visibility of any other voice design plans, TTS or otherwise, Ubisoft had for the game.
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So SIDE UK didn't put the TTS in, which leaves Ubisoft the culprit. Ubisoft in fact confirmed it was their doing, but the explanation the developer gave is a bit bizarre:

During the development process of a game, some teams use multiple placeholder assets, including text to speech voiceover, until final dubbing is delivered. The English version of these 8 lines of text for this character were not properly implemented but will be swapped out and updated with an upcoming patch. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is fully voice-overed in English, French, Spanish, German and Farsi with more than 12,000 lines in total. It is also subtitled in Italian, Portuguese-Brazilian, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Polish and Japanese.
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www.ign.com

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Will Have a Character Voiced by Text-to-Speech at Launch - IGN

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week. While we really dug the game, there's one odd detail that stuck out: one of the game's minor NPCs will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch, seemingly because someone forgot to record and add a human being's voice for the role.
www.ign.com www.ign.com

So is this case of

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Or

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MarcelloF

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The explanation makes sense to me. I don't understand what IGN thinks is bizarre about it.

If it was a bunch of characters, I'd be suspicious, but this one single character being AI voiced makes no sense to be on purpose to me.
 
Dyle

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Who cares? No one who speaks English plays games we just argue about them on the internet
 
PlayBee

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The explanation is pretty much exactly what I would have assumed happened. It makes sense that devs would use TTS as a placeholder until the final lines are available. I mean the alternative that I've seen is recording it themselves, which is also pretty funny
 
SirKai

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Seems like a genuine error, but this is probably the worst possible climate for a fuckup like this. Ubisoft really should not have allowed this to happen.
 
namerson23

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Sounds like an honest mistake if it was just 8 lines out of 12,000 like they're claiming. Still plenty excited to check this out.
 
Gold!e

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Not an ideal article to have come out in front of your game's release but at least they're aware of the situation.
Hope this doesn't mean it's getting pushed out without the team having enough time.

I do wonder if they'd bother changing it if it went unnoticed.
That clip they linked sounds like shit and would've taken me right out of the game, but also sounds a lot like VO I've heard here & there in open-world games.
 
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dex3108

dex3108

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MarcelloF said:
The explanation makes sense to me. I don't understand what IGN thinks is bizarre about it.

If it was a bunch of characters, I'd be suspicious, but this one single character being AI voiced makes no sense to be on purpose to me.
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To put some context around this. Ubisoft was one of the first gaming companies to sign deal with Nvidia for their AI Voice tech they showed at CES.
 
LavaBadger

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Well, if the implication is that this character is only TTS voiced in English, I can see how someone could have forgotten to record voice lines for them or forgot to implement them. In which case maybe the simplest solution seemed to be to throw a placeholder in rather than schedule and record the lines. (I'm not convinced simply no one noticed at any point.) Quite bad timing for it though.

But I also wouldn't be shocked if this was a little test case to see if people would notice or be bothered as a data point for whether it might be usable for more characters in the future. I wonder if it would have been a story at all but for the current climate.
 
Yuntu

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Seems like a clear mistake on Ubisofts part and no ill intentions. Especially for someone with, according to them, 8 lines in total.

Also TTS isn't AI, I hope people don't start that convo.
 
Magneto

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bloopland33

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It's obviously an honest mistake. Unless you think their evil master plan was genuinely to record VO for all but eight lines, and then cut corners/screw the labor force on those last eight.
 
GeeTeeCee

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I'm sure there was text to speech used for one or two characters in the Discovery Tour mode in AC Valhalla. Not sure if they ever patched out those lines.
 
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dex3108

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thomas_cale said:
It´s text to speech and no Voice AI, so what´s the context that´s being implied?
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Nvidia tech converts your voice to text, then AI is used to understand meaning, forms text response and then it uses text to speech to generate answer and lipsync. So Ubisoft is really interested in AI. They already are apparently using it for writing to help writers with (i forgot how they are calling it) NPC oneliners. .
 
Keiriks

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yknow what I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that it's a placeholder. It doesn't just very obviously sound like TTS, it also sounds like really old and basic TTS.
 
LordFlash

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That is genuinely hilarious. I bet there are a ton of "blame X" email chains with all the "CC'd manager" too lol.

bloopland33 said:
It's obviously an honest mistake. Unless you think their evil master plan was genuinely to record VO for all but eight lines, and then cut corners/screw the labor force on those last eight.
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They were 200 USD over budget and this was the sacrifice needed.
 
Yuntu

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dex3108 said:
Nvidia tech converts your voice to text, then AI is used to understand meaning, forms text response and then it uses text to speech to generate answer and lipsync. So Ubisoft is really interested in AI. They already are apparently using it for writing to help writers with (i forgot how they are calling it) NPC oneliners. .
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I mean I get it, but this really just seems like a fuckup and no ill intentions. It's not even some advanced TTS, its really basic stuff.
 
thomas_cale

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dex3108 said:
Nvidia tech converts your voice to text, then AI is used to understand meaning, forms text response and then it uses text to speech to generate answer and lipsync. So Ubisoft is really interested in AI. They already are apparently using it for writing to help writers with (i forgot how they are calling it) NPC oneliners. .
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And where is the connection to this? It´s 8 lines from a semingly minor character
 
Tbm24

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dex3108 said:
Nvidia tech converts your voice to text, then AI is used to understand meaning, forms text response and then it uses text to speech to generate answer and lipsync. So Ubisoft is really interested in AI. They already are apparently using it for writing to help writers with (i forgot how they are calling it) NPC oneliners. .
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So, you think that's much more likely than they just missed it?
 
Juraash

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If you've ever been in an alpha or beta of a game in recent times, there's a decent chance you've seen this kind of thing. Diablo IV had tons of this shit, even spots where a single line would be split between real VA and TTS. Obviously it was all handled by the time the game actually came out.

In any case, I don't think this is a scandalous or malicious as some might like, if it were it would have likely been far more widespread.
 
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